Of all the facts I stumbled on while looking into the history of our beloved Red Rocks Amphitheatre, one struck me particularly hard: Since 2010, Red Rocks has broken its record for the most shows it hosted year over year.

A given concert season at the venue that once ran from Memorial Day through Labor Day now kicks off in April and wraps up in early October, with a couple of events such as Winter on the Rocks and Halloween on the Rocks falling outside of those boundaries.

That has shaken out to a total of 138 concerts scheduled in 2016 so far. If you’re a music fan, that has to be a good thing, right? More shows means more of your favorite bands playing what any Colorado resident worth their Five Mountain Pass will tell you is the best music venue in the country.

But with the gates to the Valhalla of outdoor live music propped open for more than a third of the year, Red Rocks doesn’t enjoy the exclusive, club-like status it once did. A headlining gig at Red Rocks was once a marker for high-tier success for bands. Like playing Madison Square Garden, which has more than double the capacity, no one can tell you anything if you’ve been on that stage. After all, how many venues bestow their headliners with an award just for playing?

The stage that legendary bands once aspired to for years — like U2, whose members AEG Live Rocky Mountains CEO Chuck Morris drove to the venue after a show at Denver’s Rainbow Room assuring them they’d someday climb it — has become a matter of numbers.

Take Bryson Tiller, for example. The 23-year-old R&B artist just played Denver for the first time in February, selling out Denver’s Ogden Theatre. On Wednesday, he seemed to skip about 10 steps, debuting at Red Rocks as a headliner. This is just months after Tiller released his debut album, “TRAPSOUL,” a tepid if buzzed-about attempt at taking up Drake’s brooding sing-rap throne.

It was a gamble that didn’t quite pay off. Even with the help of Anderson Paak, another hot name in pop-R&B, Tiller failed to sell out.

The music nerd’s argument goes that Tiller hasn’t paid his dues yet, anyway. Numbers aside -— “TRAPSOUL” did go platinum, even if that might not mean as much as it used to with regards to the Recording Industry Association of American’s convoluted definition of an album “purchase” — Tiller is an unknown outside of modern R&B/hip-hop obsessives, having only made his major network television debut last week.

Maybe that’s to his credit and a sign of the times of the internet-propelled music industry, but it’s also indicative of a shift in Red Rocks’ symbolic status. No longer must you earn your place in the hallway of names scrawled in the tunnel backstage. If you have the right management, you can buy it.

“(Playing Red Rocks) used to be something every artist aspired to do, but the fact is, anyone that can pay the rent can play there now,” said G. Brown, director of the Colorado Music Hall of Fame. “While I celebrate that — that there’s a more generous use of the facility — I do miss those old days when it was a more of a career benchmark.”

For those who do know the gravity of the stage, Red Rocks still means a great deal. Denver native Bridget Law, fiddler and vocalist for Nederland’s Elephant Revival, used to cut class in high school to hang out at Red Rocks with her friends, occasionally bushwhacking into an off-trail cave they sang and clapped into.

“I never imagined that someday I’d be on that stage in this capacity,” Law said ahead of the band’s debut headlining performance at the venue May 22.

As for what it means to her?

“I mean, it’s only the coolest gig on Earth,” she laughed. “I can’t imagine a more beautiful place to play music.”

My Morning Jacket, which played its seventh and eighth shows at the venue this year, isn’t a local but counts the venue as a home.

“We have a lot of them on the road, but we play Red Rocks, it definitely feels like home,” said Patrick Hallahan, the band’s longtime drummer. “It’s one of our favorite places to play.”

To hear Hallahan tell it, the venue is still a special one for performers — whether they realize it or not. “It’s an energy spot in the universe — like a vortex,” he said. “It has a rhythm of its own that (musically) propels you into places you think you couldn’t go.”

As a fan, that’s just what you want to hear. So long as your favorite artists still value the stage, the venue’s almost-palpable electricity between the audience and performers at Red Rocks will continue. But should the venue get too dependent on the revenue brought in by its massive schedule and go out of its way to book an exhausting calendar, Red Rocks could become just another pretty room on the circuit — if it hasn’t already.

Ben Platt, who more than three years ago spoke the words and sang the music of “Dear Evan Hansen” for the first time, going on to win the Tony Award in June for best actor in a musical, will leave the celebrated musical in the fall, the show’s producers announced Monday.